We began pulling up baby carrots from our flower boxes last week, and of course the carrots are delicious. The carrots grow until they reach the bottom of the flower box. Then they grow sideways.
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The regular carrots in our raised garden bed are still growing slowly.
In other riveting garden news: Our zucchini plants are producing so much that we can’t keep up with them. We’ve been eating peas and beans for the past couple weeks, though not in large numbers. The beets are coming along, slowly. The celery looks beautiful but not large enough to harvest yet. Cucumbers are just beginning to grow on the vine. And our run of fresh strawberries for dessert every night is over. It lasted about 3 weeks. Oh — and we cut the splitting head off our garden bed broccoli last night and had it with some pan-fried cod. The broccoli was okay, but hardly worth the 2 square feet of garden space we sacrificed for it.
Lots of changes for the garden next year. This is still a gardening blog, right?
I took photos yesterday of every single thing growing in our backyard. We’ve had some hardships in the garden this year with slugs eating away at the broccoli, onions and some other crops. Our beets are pitiful and just about everything else has grown at a much slower pace than last year. But things are starting to pick up and there have been a few surprises. So here’s a pictorial review of everything growing in our small backyard (this is a long post), starting off with a zucchini plant growing upside-down in a bag:
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Here’s a photo of our first ripe strawberry of 2010 picked from our overgrown strawberry patch five minutes ago (it was larger than it looks in the photo). I’m glad I didn’t bite into it. Pulling the stem off revealed a baby slug hiding at the top of the strawberry. It was gross, but the strawberry was super sweet.
We didn’t have a problem with slugs last year, but this year they’ve nearly decimated our container broccoli and some Spanish onions that have been growing beautifully in a speaker on the side of our shed. They’re eating away at our pea plants and beans too. I’ve used containers full of beer and spread out coffee grinds as pesticides, but neither seem to help much. From now on, we’ll have to go out at night and pick them off with our hands and kill them. That’s apparently the best way to get rid of them — squish the adult breeding population. I’m not sure what brought the slugs on in such force this year. We picked some long green caterpillars off one of the broccolis today too. Maybe the broccoli are too attractive for the slugs and bugs to ignore. The broccolis move in and there goes the neighbourhood.
Read on . . . »
Not satisfied with a mere 8 x 8 garden, we decided to buy several plastic flower boxes (or window boxes) to grow some herbs like mint, chives, dill and so on, along with beets (for the greens), carrots and green onions. At the moment, we have 7 boxes, which we bought on sale for $5 a piece. (UPDATE: Picasa slideshows don’t progress automatically anymore. You have to manually click through to view each photo.)
To fill these boxes, and to have enough soil for the next few levels of the potato tower, we bought a huge industrial-strength garbage bag full of soil from Ross Traverse. Ross is a well-known local horticulturist and his soil is his own special mix of compost, topsoil, peat and lime. I don’t know how large the bag is, but it’s huge and it has to be the best deal in town: $11. If you live around St. John’s, Newfoundland, and you need some good gardening soil, don’t go to any of the big stores — just visit Traverse Gardens because. We plan to go back to buy 3 or 4 more bags at least.
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